The Wharton School

In 1881, American entrepreneur and industrialist Joseph Wharton established the world’s first collegiate school of business at the University of Pennsylvania — a radical idea that revolutionized both business practice and higher education.

Since then, the Wharton School has continued innovating to meet mounting global demand for new ideas, deeper insights, and  transformative leadership. We blaze trails, from the nation’s first collegiate center for entrepreneurship in 1973 to our latest research centers in alternative investments and neuroscience.

Wharton's faculty members generate the intellectual innovations that fuel business growth around the world. Actively engaged with the leading global companies, governments, and non-profit organizations, they represent the world's most comprehensive source of business knowledge.

For more information, see the Research, Directory & Publications site.

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  • Publication
    Employer 401(k) Matches for Student Debt Repayment: Killing Two Birds with One Stone?
    (2024-05-04) Horneff, Vanya; Maurer, Raimond; Mitchell, Olivia S
    Almost 50 million Americans are burdened by the need to repay close to $2 trillion in student loan debt obligations, while at the same time saving in their employer-provided pension accounts. This article shows how workers can maximize their lifetime wellbeing by timing loan repayment and saving in tax-qualified retirement plans when these choices are shaped by employer-sponsored matching retirement contributions for qualifying student loan payments, as intended by the 2022 SECURE 2.0 Act. Our rich life cycle model predicts that, by age 50, employees will repay more debt but reduce own retirement plan contributions by almost half, offset by higher employer-matching contributions that take loan repayments into account. Accordingly, pre-retirement financial assets in and outside DC plans barely change; moreover, workers’ optimal consumption rises by up to 3% prior to retirement, so that the reform will not lead to earlier loan discharges. Overall, 401(k) plan benefit payouts during retirement are not anticipated to change materially. Finally, our model predicts that anticipated additional employer costs due to the new matches will amount to around 2.4 – 4.3% of annual earnings for workers age 40 – 50, and expected federal income taxes paid over the lifetime would increase by about 1.8 – 2.5% (in present value).
  • Publication
    Sustainable Financing For Kenyan Community Health Worker Programs
    (2024) Feng, Alice
    Community health workers (CHWs) are vital for providing healthcare access to underserved populations in sub-Saharan Africa, yet financing for CHW programs remains a challenge. This thesis explores potential financing instruments for Kenya's CHW program through an in-depth analysis of seven case studies spanning traditional grants, public loans, debt conversion, private loans, social enterprises, grant-based public-private partnerships, and results-based financing. Drawing from informant interviews and literature reviews, each model is evaluated across financial sustainability, CHW operational focus, and contextual alignment to Kenya. The analysis reveals that while public instruments have bolstered disease-specific initiatives, overreliance on external funding poses risks to long-term sustainability. Private solutions allow for self-sustainability in the long run, but funding size and initial capital needed remain a concern. Innovative approaches combining the public and private sectors have the potential to be tailored for CHW programs while generating sustainable revenue; however, they require substantial planning and investment. Across all models, shared characteristics for scalability and impact include robust governance, domestic resource mobilization, and country ownership.
  • Publication
    The Twenty-Three Trillion Dollar Weapon: The Impacts of Financial Warfare Between the United States and China
    (2023-05-01) Brotherton, Paige
    The United States has been a world power since the beginning of the twentieth century, and the world power since its defeat of the Soviet Union in the Cold War. China, meanwhile, has been on the economic and political rise for a little over thirty years, its meteoric expansion raising questions about its willingness and desire to compete with the United States. Such a conflict could take the form of a Cold War, or something much, much messier. Tension regarding Taiwan and spheres of influence in the Pacific, along with fundamentally contrasting political, economic, and social ideals, lead the world to wonder if another war between powers is brewing. However, as this paper shows, the cost would be too high—literally. The intertwined economies of both countries mean both would have too much to lose by engaging in warfare that prevents trade. This paper explores sanctions and their affects during warfare using three case studies before analyzing the situation between China and United States for consequent observations and predictions.
  • Publication
    "Smells Like Team Spirit": Turnover and Team Success Through the Lens of Rock Bands
    (2023-12-01) DiCampli, Isabella
    This paper focuses on exploring how team success differs across different levels of member turnover within teams. The increased use of teams in organizations has led to a growing literature on the way teams form and how they function. One important part of team development that researchers are often interested in is how long a team works together, or their tenure. Understanding the impact of team tenure on team performance allows organizations to take into account the impact of trends like member turnover when deciding how to structure their teams. With the growing importance and prevalence of team dynamics in organizations, the question begs itself: can team success be at all explained or predicted by patterns in member turnover? In order to answer this question, this research evaluates how member turnover affects team success by looking at turnover trends within musical groups formed in the 1950s-2000s. The specific research approach will be to use a regression analysis to determine if a musical group’s success can be at all attributed to the patterns of turnover they have experienced during their tenure, and then to use management theory to recommend best practices for organizations to use when thinking about teams. The reasons for focusing on musical groups as the basis for teamwork are trifold. First, the complexity and breadth of the paper’s objective necessitates choosing a narrow segment of teams to analyze, given that a “team” can be formed for many reasons and used in many contexts. Second, musical groups are one type of team where each shares a very specific objective, which is to make good music and achieve success and popularity, at least within their own genre fan base. Lastly, musical groups have member turnover information that is easily accessible, as band membership is often in the public eye. The following section will provide a brief overview of the reasons for musician turnover, in order to set the framework for the model creation.
  • Publication
    Exposure to Similar vs. Diverse Perspectives in Forecasting Tournaments on Human Welfare and Societal Change
    (2023-05-01) Chen, Kevin
    What are the intra-individual benefits to participating in forecasting tournaments? This paper presents the findings of an empirical study testing how exposure to similar vs. diverse perspectives in forecasting tournaments affects distributions of predictions and estimated ranges, judgmental accuracy, belief updating, and affective polarization. Everyday participants were randomly assigned to one of two conditions—exposure to similar vs. diverse perspectives—and made individual forecasts and rationales for four domains, reviewed similar vs. diverse team forecasts and rationales, optionally updated their individual forecasts and rationales in light of team information, and completed other individual difference assessments. Across domains, (i) there were no significant main effect of perspective, main effect of stage, nor interaction on judgmental accuracy; (ii) participants exposed to similar perspectives updated their predictions more often than did those exposed to diverse perspectives; (iii) participants exposed to similar perspectives rated conservatives more warmly than did those exposed to diverse perspectives (with nonsignificant but directionally consistent results for ratings toward liberals and moderates).
  • Publication
    The Impact of Open Source Communities on Financing Dynamics of Diverse Entrepreneurs
    (2024-02-01) Liang, Christine
    Over the past decade, open source has fueled the growth of everything from startups to solo game developers to NASA, and in the past year, the world has seen the largest number of open source contributions (Woodward, 2022; Daigle 2023). More than 30% of Fortune 100 companies have open source program offices to build and contribute to open source software, which helps entrepreneurs build innovative products and platforms faster than ever (Woodward, 2022). Moreover, open source is a key driving force in the advancement of modern digital innovations, such as artificial intelligence (AI), big data, and cloud services (Lin & Maruping, 2022). With the rising engagement with open source communities, there is a growing body of literature on how open source software has the potential to attract financing from investors. Because this impact on financing remains a new area of research, it is unclear whether open source engagement will improve or exacerbate the disparities in venture capital financing. As the research on the relationship between open source software and startup financing expands, this thesis aims to improve our limited understanding of how involvement in open source platforms impacts the financing dynamics of diverse entrepreneurs in the technology industry.
  • Publication
    A Sentiment Analysis of Customer Reviews of Two Products Sold on Amazon
    (2023-05-01) Campbell, Bailey
    Now more than ever, product reviews are used to help consumers make purchasing decisions. This form of online content serves as a potential source of data for researchers to look into for new ways to make conclusions about what marketing tactics or product qualities are valuable in today’s world of e-commerce. This case study of two nearly identical smart TVs investigates the correlation between review sentiment and consumer satisfaction in regards to a few factors: star ratings, product attributes, and price. Through sentiment analysis it was determined that sentiment towards a product is significantly less polarized than the star rating a consumer gives. An emotion map (word cloud) was used for an observational analysis into what attributes are important for the products in this case study. Price, pending further studies, was determined to have an effect on review sentiment for the two products through regression analysis.
  • Publication
    Profitability in Sports Betting: A Case Study of Men's Tennis
    (2023-03-01) Ciobanu, Robert
    This paper evaluates the feasibility of profit generation through sports betting. While sports gambling represents a large and rapidly growing economic sector, few bettors are actually profitable and there is limited evidence of successful publicly available strategies. We investigate how such a strategy can be built for the game of men’s tennis. Our methodology for creating a strategy consists of two components. First, it includes a predictive analytics component, in which we combine a large number of observable player, match, and tournament characteristics in order to estimate the probability of either player winning the match. We study both linear and non-linear multivariate combination approaches. Second, our methodology contains a financial strategy component, in which we focus on using money allocation techniques to achieve optimal returns. Through statistical simulations and back-testing, we find that it is possible to generate positive expected profits at sustainable levels of risk, with both formal and informal strategies. Interestingly, we also establish that building a successful strategy does not necessarily require the bettor’s model to have higher predictive accuracy than the betting markets. Instead, bettors can focus on a narrow segment of matches (for example “upsets” – i.e., matches in which the lower-ranked player wins) and outperform the market in that segment alone. We conclude that sports betting can be used as a profitable investment vehicle. Beyond tennis, these techniques can be applied to most other sports, especially those for which large volumes of historical data are publicly available.
  • Publication
    Investor Heterogeneity in Treasury Markets
    (2024-04-01) Curie, Wyatt
    This paper replicates the demand system for asset pricing using security-level holdings data of treasuries and corporate bonds. Portfolio choice is modeled using characteristics like coupon rate, time to maturity, creditrating, issuance size, and bid-ask spread. Yield to maturity is instrumented by cross-sectional variation in pre-defined investment mandates. The effect of demand shocks on term premia are analyzed by investor type.
  • Publication
    The Impact of MFI in Rural Haiti: Comparing the Effects of Local MFIs vs. Large Multinationals on Economic and Social Impact in Rural Haiti
    (2023-05-01) Wesdjina Brevil
    Microfinance and microcredit, as forms of microlending to impoverished individuals, bridge the gap in access to capital prevalent in developing regions. The practice of microcredit, officially recognized as a transformative strategy, traces its roots back to Bangladesh. It was here that economist Muhamad Yunus, recognizing the high demand for capital among the poor for business activities, pioneered this approach in the late 1970s (Valadez et al., 2011). This practice, though initially known by different names in other countries, has since become a beacon of hope for poverty reduction.